


Start Today Tomorrow

by KittyViolet



Series: Kitty told me to name this series [14]
Category: New Mutants, X-Men (Comicverse), Young Avengers (Comics)
Genre: F/F, Time Travelling Lesbians
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-27
Packaged: 2018-12-16 10:24:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11826780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: An X-training exercise in the woods gets interrupted. A lot.





	1. Chapter 1

Illyana wakes up because Kitty already did: the mutant who can walk through walls has been turning, restless, rolling the top of the sheet between thumb and forefinger, fretting, closing her eyes and then opening them, and she’s not going to get back to sleep.

“Katya,” Magik says, putting her hand on the other girl’s hand. She’s trembling, then rigid. “What’s wrong?”

“I could really kill someone with this,” Kitty says, phasing her other hand semi-transparent on top of the sapphire counterpane, so her forearm looks blue. “And not by accident. I mean, ever since I got my powers I knew I could really hurt someone, or hurt myself, a lot by accident. That’s just how making matter… unlikely… works. But after yesterday’s training, and after—“

“What happened in Massachusetts—“ Illyana guesses.

“After that, and knowing about my scary future self, and everything—I could just really easily make someone’s heart stop. Or rip their lungs open by reaching inside them. Just, like, that. I have the power to hurt people so fast, so much. All I have to do is want that, and reach for them, and it could happen. What I could let myself do.”

“But you won’t,” Illyana says, and looks her best friend in the eye. “You are not someone who has wanted to do that.”

Kitty swallows hard. Illyana Rasputin has absolutely wanted to do that, or something like that, and for very good reason, though not to a human being. What Magik has been through… 

Sometimes, Kitty reflects, the passion—the various passions—in Illyana are like refined metals, the kind you can use for jewelry, or for circuitry, or for sculpture, or for precision tools—it came into being through fire, and it started in a much, much rougher, even an infernal place.

“You are not. I know you,” Illyana says. “I also know that it’s 5am Eastern, and we are going to get up on time, because Kurt is taking us into the woods.” 

Which means that Illyana is going to try to coax Kitty back to sleep. Verbal persuasion might work, but if the youngest X-Man has calmed down just a bit—and she has stopped trembling—there are more effective ways.

Illyana puts two fingers, then three fingers, on Kitty’s left nipple, over the sheet and the nightgown, and starts to rub, very gently, in circles. Then less gently, then under the sheet, then under the nightgown, then under the training bra that she still sleeps in. Then two fingers on the other nipple. 

Kitty closes her lips and hums, almost inaudibly at first, and then she’s saying “hmmmm,” and Kitty’s right hand, under the sheets, reaches up until it’s reciprocally between Illyana’s inner thighs; it stays there—she wants her hand to stay there, soft and slim and solid, not quite forever, just until her friend’s thighs open up, and they rotate, and Kitty can move her own fingers up and down, and up and down, and in and out… 

Magik usually keeps her tail out of the way for these tenderest moments, but right now she’s wrapped that tail—or else it’s wrapped itself—around Kitty’s calf: like a sash, like an accessory, no, like something soft and lithe and definitely a part of her best friend.

The tail’s loop gets tighter. Illyana lets the rest of her body open up to her best friend’s hands, which get faster, still solid, and then just slightly immaterial at the top of the arc—yes! Illyana thinks but doesn’t say, and then thinks, disjointedly, delighted for now, not least because Kitty has used her powers for good again, and that will change her mood, and let the both of them get back to sleep. 

The young Russian spellcaster is right. Having given her best friend pleasure, Kitty curls up, the small spoon, the bug in a rug, her palm between her knees, lost in a reassuring near-slumber: the two of them, together, definitely won’t hurt anyone… not for fees, not in the trees…


	2. Chapter 2

Kurt would never violate their privacy enough to teleport into their room—he’s a gentleman, not a creep—but he does want them to wake up on time and get out there into the woods, into the treetops, and he has found an ingenious way to signal that it’s time, without doing anything that could be mistaken for a supervillain attack: he’s set up a fan in front of the girls’ door and then teleported down the hall, so that the sulfurous stench left after Kurt ‘ports blows directly over them. 

It’s like a skunk attack, if a skunk attack came with associations of aerial combat and grave bodily risk, and both girls know what it means right away: they scramble to get up and dressed, not in full black-and-yellow, nor in Kitty’s Shi’ar-made costumes (she took home five), but in long sleeves and pants for a day in the woods. 

Having worked with Wolverine on survival and tracking and camping (well, Illyana worked with Wolverine on that, at least), Kitty and Magik and Wolfsbane are going out to the forest to work with Nightcrawler on broken terrain, multiple obstacle, natural setting combat, the kind where you can’t see more than two feet away because there are so many trees, and, also, you can’t just cut down all the trees, and also, maybe you’re fighting opponents who can turn into trees. Evil Ents, Kitty thinks. Or evil ants.

“Is this a New Mutants training exercise?” Kitty also thinks. “Is it an insult? Or a way to get a walk in the woods afterwards with Illyana, a way to pick flowers for her?” She remembers Ilya’s story about the acorn that kept her sane—she hasn’t heard all about Limbo, probably no one will ever hear all about Limbo, but that story she knows. She thinks about Storm and Storm’s hanging garden, Storm’s effortless communion with all things wild; the closest that Katherine Pryde, the child of a fine suburban education, can get to that feeling is probably how she felt about elves and wolves in Elfquest. Kitty likes computers, and open classrooms, and libraries, and sometimes shiny malls. And, also, Illyana. Who likes growing things.

There’s Rahne, already in wolf form, sniffing the ground, then standing up in half-wolf form, looking for Kurt, looking for instructions, her tail swishing back and forth.

BAMF. Kurt is ten feet above them. He clutches a metal sphere. The sphere is the target. Their goal is to get the sphere from Kurt without harming the trees, or Kurt, or anything else. Kitty thinks of the metal ball Luke Skywalker attacks with his lightsaber: would it help her to close her eyes? Probably not. Kurt is five feet to their left now—bamf!—and now he’s climbing an oak tree. Rahne is climbing it too, climbing faster than Kurt, using all four wolf-paws to get out on the tree limb. She’s caught up to him, but he throws the ball into the air—“Not so fast, kleiner Wolf!”—then teleports to the ball and uses his tail to catch a neighboring tree.

Now Rahne is a wolf up a tree—“wolf” in German must be “wolf,” Kitty thinks—and Illyana, who can’t use her tail that way (it’s not strong enough) is using her human strength to climb the same tree and urge Rahne forward, telling her where Nightcrawler has gone.

Professor Xavier may be a jerk, but he knows how to write a lesson plan, Kitty thinks. She thinks about lesson plans a lot: if she doesn’t have to lead a resistance army when she’s a grownup, she’s probably going to teach in a field with math. The lesson here may well be less “catch the Kurt with the ball” and more “Rahne has to learn to work with Illyana, to get over her fears.” Kitty’s there mostly to mask the real point of the exercise; including more New Mutants would make Rahne more nervous (Sam, Roberto) or figure out the point of the exercise and perhaps communicate it to Rahne (Dani), or start a forest fire (Amara). 

Kitty also wants to catch Kurt. The point is, as with all such games, not to go where the target is, but to go where the target is going to be.

“Where’s it going?” she asks Magik, who moves her fingers in the air, lighting it up in a kind of cat’s cradle: it’s a motion-prediction spell. “1:00 or 7:00. No, both,” Illyana says.

Rahne tries to pounce on Kurt from above; Kurt teleports in one direction but throws the ball in the other, towards the edge of the forest, where Kitty—who can’t outrun a metal baseball—runs perpendicular to its path; if she can touch and phase the ball itself--

Instead, the shiny steel ball runs into an arrow, and the arrow, slowed by the collision, runs into a maple tree, bonks the bark as if testing for sap, and then falls to the ground.

The young woman—college-aged, maybe? older than Kitty and Illya, but not by much--- walks up to the hurt maple and retrieves the arrow; she has black hair, a confident posture, a look of perpetual mild surprise, also a violet singlet with matching armguard. It’s like someone drew Hawkeye’s costume without the scaly bits, then redrew it for a girl, then redrew it again to make it more like a costume you’d actually want to wear while performing derring-do, if the derring-do meant shooting dozens of arrows.

“I’m Kate,” says the archer. “You must be Kitty, Illyana and—I’m sorry, is there anyone else around?” Wolfsbane is, understandably, hiding behind the largest trunk she can find. Good tactic, Kitty thinks. Sniff them before they see you. Where’s Kurt?

“Don’t worry, I’m an Avenger. Well, I was sent by the Avengers. We know you’re the good guys. I’m not here to get you. I came from the future. No, not that future,” she nods to Kitty. (How does this Kate know what happened to that Kate, Kate Pryde? Can she know?) “A bad future though. I came here with these”—this Kate in Hawkeye’s costume gestures broadly to her silvery high-tech quiver—“to prevent that. I was hoping to get your help. I have”—from the inside of her violet vest, she pulls out something the size and shape of ten playing cards, stacked; it glows—“maybe four hours to find and secure a particular address in”—she looks at the rectangular thing again—“Chappaqua. Do any of you have the ability to fly, right now? None of you can fly, right? Or a car?”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Does future Kate deserve the mutants' help?

BAMF! Kurt appears at ground-level, right behind this archer from the future, and the teleporter stands in what Kitty recognizes as a combat-ready pose. Kate nocks an arrow, impossibly fast—how do archers do it?— spins, points the arrow at Kurt, then takes the arrow off the grip, having recognized him as Nightcrawler. In Kate’s future, Kitty thinks, Nightcrawler (if not the other X-Men—and who are the other X-Men, by that point? are they a team?) must be somebody other superheroes recognize as a superhero, someone to trust, even if they’ve never met. She remembers, with some shame attached, how freaked-out she herself had been when she met Kurt for the first time. And the second, and third. And yet—as anyone who has spent time hanging out with him knows, there’s nothing demonic—indeed, something devout—about him. The German mutant and the violet archer are ready to talk, almost ready to trust one another, but also ready to fight.

Illyana stands a couple of feet away, ready to teleport the lot of them into another space where she’s in charge, if this purple future not-Kitty Kate is not the person she claims to be.

What does “demonic” mean, anyway? Ready to hurt people? Able to hurt people? Possessed of aggression? Ready to take back what was taken from you, what someone else set on fire, what once was yours? Now Kitty isn’t thinking about Kurt at all. Nor is she thinking about the mysterious not-Hawkeye from the future. Focus, Katherine Pryde. Focus.

Wolfsbane stalks out from behind a tree, stands up straight, having first assumed human form. Her frizzy red half-grown-out ex-buzz-cut is a right mess.

“I know you’re Nightcrawler," Kate says, "and we know the stories about you—we know some of what you’ve been through, already, by now. Also the thing where the public doesn’t understand you, and has mixed feelings about you, where you're hated and feared? That I get. My dad is a super-rich bad guy, my sister’s a society-page type, and I used their money to get the best training I could with these”—she gestures towards her quiver—“then ditched them to save people with my powered friends. I’m”—she pauses, aware she’ll confuse them again—“Hawkeye. I mean, I’m the younger Hawkeye. I didn’t exactly choose to be Hawkeye, but people kept calling me that and it stuck, and then trained with grown-up Hawkeye and we were Hawkeyes together, which is how the Avengers...”

Kate stops, shakes her head—that haircut’s brilliant, Kitty thinks; it waves in the wind and yet never gets in her face— and then regains her composure. “I’m sorry. Time travel’s disorienting. I’m the younger of the two Hawkeyes who work together in our time line, and I need your help in preventing a terrible future, or making a better one possible. It’s going to involve a bit of time in the woods, and then a trip to the other end of Westchester, where I hope you’ll help me catch high tech thieves and spies who won't commit their crimes until my time.”

Kitty totally understands the combination of badass in combat plus chatty when nervous and meeting new people; that seems to be future-Kate-Hawkeye’s deal too. Also the thing where you invite other people to name you, or tell you what you are, but you give them hint after hint after hint: if you wear nothing but purple while shooting trick arrows, there’s a name that goes with that.

“How do we know,” says Illyana, more slowly, her hands at her side, “that you’re not a shapeshifter, or a deceiver? Also, what do you want us to do?”

“You have telepaths,” Hawkeye-Kate says. “I can wait while you go get them, if you like. We have”—she looks at her arm guard, which apparently holds a watch dial, and then at the glowing thing like a handful of playing cards—“plenty of time, and Chappaqua’s less than half an hour away if there’s no traffic on the Saw Mill.”

Kurt nods. Wolfsbane sniffs the air and comes closer, then nods, first skittishly, then vigorously, towards Kurt and then towards Kitty. If Dani were here there’d be no ambiguity at all, but Kitty can make a very good guess: Rahne is saying she smells sincerity—her wolf-senses somehow mean Kate-Hawkeye’s telling the truth.

“She smells— like she’s from this part of America, aye, but not from our time,” says Rahne. “Look how comfortable she is with that, och, Star Trek communicator thing in her hand. And the water she drinks isn’t our water, exactly. Her skin smells... different. Also she smells like she’s telling the truth.”

“It’s called an iPhone,” Kate-Hawkeye says. “Lots of civilians have them. Where I’m from it’s late 2014, and we are trying to stop a dark future before it starts. We don’t know everything about what’s coming, but we do know—don’t ask how we know, it’s so complicated only Tony and the Vision understand it, something to do with Kang and the timestream and tachyons, but we are very, very sure— that something really bad is going to happen to the American government in late 2016 and 2017, and that some kind of digital spying will be involved. There are going to be a lot of emails and files on a server in lower Westchester, and villains are going to detect them, steal some of them, and use them to create some sort of scandal that ends with the Kingpin’s agents winning elections.”

“What’s an email?” Rahne asks. “And why would a villain carry them around on a serving tray?” She wrinkles her nose, as much concerned as confused.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which at least one unexpected villain appears.

Kitty is confused for a different reason: the Kingpin is a super-rich bad guy in New York City with lines in drug distribution, murder for hire, and real estate. The X-Men have never fought him. Half the time the people who “fight” him are lawyers, not costumed heroes. How does he end up taking political power? What kind of future would that be? Then she remembers her birth family in Illinois, and she understands: people like that would love nothing more than to control law enforcement, and the legal system. They’d try to scapegoat and outlaw, not only mutants, but anyone who threatened their wealth. (Starting with mutants.)

Kate shrugs and takes out eight—no, ten— arrows. “These are technology bafflers and conduits. You’re going to help me place them around Westchester, where they’ll remain entirely inert, in the ground, in the tops of tall trees, and the like, until non-super, non-time-traveling law enforcement develops the tech that lets them communicate. 

“At that point, these devices will activate, let regular law enforcement in 2014 catch the Kingpin’s guys, and let them make their case; we’ll be able to prove to the public that they’re the villains they are, before they can steal any secrets, create any scandals, or steal a U.S. election.”

“Why did they send you, instead of a high-tech hero, if this is a tech job?” Kitty wants to know.

“Because I’m not powered and there’s no high tech in my body. If I had powers, I’d probably get detected by time-traveling bad guys alert for anomalous travelers in the time stream, and the last thing we want is to get caught in another Kang story—he’s a pain to fight and the stories never make sense” (Nightcrawler is nodding). “And if I had tech inside my body and it malfunctioned, I could never get fixed or get home. Also I’m kind of a detective. I like doing something that’s really detective work, letting us catch the bad guys later. And—“

Kitty knows exactly what’s coming next. “If we don’t believe that you are who you say you are, we’ll be able to read your mind, because you haven’t been doing this for all that long: you don’t have all the psychic blocks set up yet.” She shudders. Magik, who knows exactly what Kitty’s remembering, shudders too.

“Are you with me, or do you want more proof?” Kate takes out her eye-phone again. She’s obviously from the future, she sounds good, it’s plausible. “You can call the present time Avengers if you like. We can authenticate through them if we must. But we do need to act.” Are telepaths available? Tomorrow, maybe. But not today.

“We will do this,” Kurt decides. “We will help you. If any of these technology arrows does something that’s not what you say, we know how to make it stop working”—Kitty nods, relieved; she has to stop herself from raising her hand, as if in a classroom—“and what else to do.” Now Illyana nods.

“Good,” Kate says. She nocks the first arrow, looks about her—Rahne wonders whether she, too, is sniffing the air—and fires at the property’s tallest oak. A kind of parachute descends from the arrow; an antenna extrudes and then retracts. “That’s the first tech baffle. We need to do this with a surveyor’s precision.” She takes out another arrow, but instead of firing that one, shoves it headfirst into the soft forest ground. “Wolfsbane, can you dig here?”

“Och,” Rahne says, wondering whether she ought to feel insulted. The truth is, though, that she likes digging: it’s satisfyingly primitive, especially after a morning of standing around, attempting to climb trees, and wondering what other mutants think of her, and why she’s not at ease with them. The Scottish redhead ambles over to the arrow, transforms fully into a wolf, and in a couple of minutes the arrow and its arrowhead are buried fully in the earth.

“Two here,” Kate-Hawkeye says, looking around her. “Six to go.” Illyana recognizes the way that Kate checks out her surroundings; methodically, angle after angle, the way that you learn to do if you’re always expecting a threat from the back. It’s a posture, a way to use your shoulders and your eyes and your proprioception, that you develop if you are thoroughly trained in low-tech combat, and you truly take to one or another martial art. Kitty developed something like it after she got back from Japan; it switches on and off, Illyana observes, and Kitty’s far more at ease with herself when it’s off. For Logan it’s always on. It’s also something you develop if you are used to domestic threats, if you’ve had to live in a space where you didn’t feel safe. Illyana has learned to recognise it as her default: she's almost always in that mode. There's a cost, she thinks, to feeling safe.

Kate-Hawkeye is in that mode now. Nothing at ten o’clock, Kate thinks, nothing at eleven o’clock, only a friendly Nightcrawler at twelve, Illyana at two--

THOOM. There’s a deafening noise, as of an airplane landing right on top of them, and a massive darkness all around them. It’s so sudden it feels like a magical attack, or else like some sort of weather disruption, but Illyana’s soulsword hasn’t appeared, Rahne’s senses haven’t detected a change in the weather, and—THOOM!—whatever it was, it’s gone-- but so is everything else.

Illyana and Kitty are now in a space like a cheap kids' restaurant booth, with a cheap velvet rope at one end—no, Kitty realizes, it’s not a restaurant booth; it’s a photo booth, with a curtain and a small screen and a coin slot, the kind you’d duck into for a couple of minutes to take candids, five for a dollar, with your best friend, at the mall. 

There’s clear plastic right beyond the velvet rope; Kitty isn’t surprised to learn that she can’t phase through it. Power dampeners. She and her best friend are stuck here for now. Illyana is scowling, her left hand in Kitty’s right hand. At least they’re together. But where? what next? Should Illyana take them both to Limbo? Not yet-- they nod at each other-- not till they know where their teammates, and future-Hawkeye, are.

Kate’s by herself, in a batting cage, with a baseball bat. Her bow and her quiver are still attached to her body—apparently whoever snatched her up and dumped her here just used some sort of brute-force teleportation, and they only had one shot; otherwise they’d have taken her weapons away. This kind of trap feels familiar, though. And she hasn’t brought every combat arrow she has; she needed the space in her quiver for the tech baffles, as well as for everyday, low-tech shafts. She notches, sets up, pulls and shoots one of those at the mesh of the cage overhead; as she expects, it hits some sort of force field or transparent plastic, and then falls back. There’s a slate in the cage by the stack of baseballs—not a slate, a screen. It starts to light up.

Kurt and Rahne are hundreds of feet in the air, in a sealed two-seater carriage on the top of a Ferris wheel. Rahne, returned to human form very suddenly by the shock, starts shaking, stops shaking, looks around. Nightcrawler holds her—hugs her, really—and tries to teleport to the ground; there’s a sound, and a stink of hydrogen sulfide, but they can only move a few inches within the Ferris wheel car. Of course, there’s a power dampening field He can’t leave.

At the base of the Ferris wheel there’s a movie screen, the kind you’d use for an old-style drive-in. (Has Rahne seen a drive-in? She has, from the road, but she was never allowed to attend.)

All the screens light up at once: there’s a close up on a man’s face: he’s smiling broadly, and he has orange hair, incongruous freckles, a too-large bow tie. “Welcome back,” he says, “to the all-new, all-different Kidnapping-and-Murderworld. Some of you might remember me. I’m Arcade.”


End file.
